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Jar of Marbles

When it comes to school, my biggest motivator is the deadline. No matter how difficult the task, my schoolwork expands to fill the time available for its completion. This makes those easy two-hour tasks seem a lot more daunting and stressful when I give myself a week or two to complete them. It wasn’t until this summer that I learned that assignments without deadlines are a lot like goals without a plan; if you don’t have a set time frame for the end result it is much easier to procrastinate. That’s why as of recently, I decided to set a deadline for completing my bucket list, and began applying a new strategy to help me conceptualize the time that I have left.

According to the calculations, I have 143 Saturdays left before I reach my deadline and graduate from college. Rather than crossing off days from the calendar, I carefully counted 143 marbles and put them into a jar. Each Saturday I pull one marble out and am reminded of the importance of investing my time in the places that matter. It is inevitable that I will lose my marbles, but this way I get to decide where they go. One of the aspects I love most about this deadline is that it brings order in awareness. With a visual reminder, I have become much more focused on the journey and pursuit of my goals rather than on the goals themselves. Another great attribute of this deadline is that it has caused me to look hopefully towards the future and it has kept me from binging on all but one thing—life itself. We always hope for the easy fix; the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke, but few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, just like my 143 Saturdays. As soon as the small steps start adding up, we begin working with time instead of against it.

It is not enough to be busy…the question is: what are we busy about? There is no use being “efficient” if what you are doing lacks meaning and some sense of importance. Do something that adds value to who you are and inspires you to appreciate your ordinary day. One of the greatest lessons that I have learned from this jar of marbles is that we cannot fully inhabit the life that we live unless we start developing a sense of urgency. It is my belief that everyone should have some sort of reminder to measure their days and encourage lifelong curiosity. Some use calendars; some use journals; I use a jar of marbles. How will you measure your life?

“When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.” -Friedrich Nietzsche